Amazon has slurped cloud cash for years, but a recent analysis by El Reg shows that the mega bit-seller charges a surprising premium for some of its services, and is facing stiff competition on price from rivals.
Vulture West's floating cloud bureau was recently roused from a beer-soaked sleep by a phone call from the denizens …

Method

Please can you publish your results in an Excel / Google Docs file. In addition would it be possible to disclose the methodology you've used? I recently attempted the same exercise, however I was unable to successfully disaggregate memory, vCPU and storage (and storage type): e.g. how is the price difference between an m1.small and m1.medium attributed between the difference in vCPU and memory? Thanks.

those graphs are pointless if you don't label your axes properly!

Re: those graphs are pointless if you don't label your axes properly!

That doesn't matter for comparison or analysis --- 20% more expensive stays 20% more expensive.

For acquisition, looking at any specific online offer (vendor/RAM/cost) as you would anyway if interested, that would let you pinpoint the scaling since the graph wouldn't overlap (from 60x scaling between minute and hour, down to 7x between day and week) with such a ballpark figure.

sigh

just the title of the article shows how clueless the author is (never said that about an el reg author before). amazon has been absurdly priced for MANY MANY YEARS now, again it comes down to the architectural flaws in how the system was designed(they couldn't do a better job at the time because their technology sucked, and they're so far down that suck road now that it's really really difficult to change gears at this stage).

But wait.. there's more. Google has the same model.. HP cloud is the same model.. Rack space Openstack cloud is the same model!! Openstack in general (last I was briefed on it anyway) adopts that same broken model (again because the technology isn't good enough to do it right). The likes of VMware, Hyper-V, RHEV etc got the model right, it's just complicated to scale to very high levels. So these public cloud players take the short cut, of massive compromise on features, availability, and capacity utilization in exchange for massive scale == large costs for the VAST VAST majority of applications.

You're basically reversing a efficiency trend in IT that has been going on for the past 8-10 years and going back to 90s era provisioning strategies, at least from an IaaS perspective. PaaS, and SaaS are provisioned and billed with different models and those can make sense at large scale operations for customers(obviously both of those have their own limitations). the IaaS technology the public cloud folks are making available is just absolutely terrible by contrast.

But this author doesn't know what he's talking about, I don't know why I bother to keep writing comments in his articles I suppose I should just stop.

It's not just the CPU/RAM

For deploying a practical application, it's the databases, the bandwidth charges, the load balancing, the redundancy, the location of data centres, the backups, the long term storage...

It's the availability these that currently draw me to use Amazon for my next project: the cost for the CPU/RAM combination is only one factor.

A more useful comparison might be based on a set of sample applications with N web servers, a N gig database, 2 geographic/availability zone redundancy, and an assumed amount of traffic, regular backups, failover between servers, etc. and then estimate the running costs of the example setup.

twice a year, interactive graphs

As above.

And a link to the raw data so we can check/provide alternative transforms for our bosses if we're comparing amazon to google, and no-one else. i.e. We could have decided who we want to work with because of factors other than cost.

anything you

What kind of instances?

Thanks for the great charts.

Just wondering if these prices are for Spot Instances, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Instances, or their equivalents with the each provider? Any idea how the cloud hosting market share is split between pre-paid workloads (i.e. reserved or dedicated) and on-demand?